The subject of the rich and the poor has been, ever since, the subject of my musings. I think I never mentioned it to other people, not even to my mother, but I thought about it often.

I still needed, however, to take a step forward along the path of my discoveries.

I knew that there were poor and that there were rich; and I knew that the poor were more numerous than the rich, and were to be found everywhere.

I had yet to learn the third dimension of injustice.

Until I was eleven years old I believed that there were poor just as there was grass, and that there were rich just as there were trees.

One day I heard for the first time, from the lips of a working-man, that there were poor because the rich were too rich, and that revelation made a strong impression on me.

I connected that opinion with all the things I had thought of on the subject...and, almost instantaneously, I realized that the man was right. Even more than through the power of reason, I felt it was true.

Furthermore, although so young, I had already come to believe more in what the poor said than in the words of the rich, because the former seemed to me more sincere, franker, and also better. With this step I had come to know the third dimension of social injustice.

This third step in the discovery of life and its social problems is, indubitably, taken by many people. The majority of men and women know that there are poor because there are rich, but they learn it unconsciously, and perhaps because of that it seems natural and logical to them. 

I admit I learned it almost at one blow, and that I learned it though suffering; and I declare that it never seemed to me either logical or natural.

I felt, even then, in my innermost heart, something which I now recognize as a feeling of indignation. I did not understand why if there were poor people there must also be rich ones, nor why the latter's eagerness for riches must be the cause of the poverty of so many people.

Never since then have I been able to think of this injustice without indignation, and thinking about it always produced a stifling feeling, as though, being unable to remedy the evil that I witnessed, I had not sufficient air to breathe.

I think now that many people become accustomed to social injustice in the first years of their lives. Even the poor think the misery they endure is natural and logical. They learn to tolerate what they see or suffer, just as it is possible to acquire a tolerance for powerful poison.

I cannot accustom myself to poison, and never, since I was eleven years old, have I been able to accustom myself to social injustice.

This is perhaps, the only inexplicable thing of my life; certainly it is the only thing which manifested itself in me without any apparent cause.

I think that, just as some persons have a special tendency to feel beauty differently and more intensely, than do people in general, and therefore become poets or painters or musicians, I have a special inherent tendency to feel injustice with unusual and painful intensity.

Can a painter say why he sees and feels color? Can a poet explain why he is a poet?

Perhaps that is why I can say why I feel painted by injustice, and why I have never been able to accept it as a natural thing, as the majority of men accept it.

Still, even if I cannot understand it myself, it is certain that my feeling of indignation at social injustice is the force which has led me by the hand, since my earliest recollections, to this day...and that it is the final cause explaining how a woman who in some people's eyes sometimes seems "superficial, common and indifferent," can decide to live a life of "incomprehensible sacrifice."